While communication between customers and service providers frequently takes place online, there remains an ongoing need for voice communications between an agent of the service provider and a customer. An agent typically is a member of a service provider's call center, in which the task of the agent is to make or answer telephone calls. A call center agent may have the responsibility to make outbound telemarketing calls to attempt to sell to potential customers, to take customer service calls from users of a service provider's data management system, to provide technical support for problems related to a data management system, to make fundraising calls for nonprofit organizations, and various other agent responsibilities.
Such calls between agents and customers are often recorded. Such call recordings are typically for quality control purposes, and include the familiar greeting that states that the call may be monitored or recorded for quality assurance purposes. Recording calls is typically beneficial to enable call center managers to review the conversation between agents and customers to analyze performance and compliance issues. For example, if a customer is unhappy with a telephone call, a manager can review the recorded call and take remedial action for the dissatisfied customer.
At times, call center agents will collect credit card information to facilitate payments by customers. However, call centers that collect credit card information over the phone need to provide data security to protect such information. In a traditional call center, when a call is being recorded, the credit card information is also recorded. Such credit card information is considered sensitive information that, if exposed to unauthorized parties, could result in financial harm to the cardholder due to potential misuse of the credit card information. To prevent unauthorized exposure to the credit card information, call center recordings that contain credit card information are secured. For example, access to recordings may be restricted to certain roles, such as a manager of an agent. Limiting access to recordings typically reduces the benefits of the recordings due to the limited number of people who have access to such recordings. It would be preferable to not have to restrict access to any recording of a call with a customer.
Consequently, there is a significant need for a technical solution to the long-standing technical problem of protecting sensitive information within recordings of call center conversations while at the same time providing access to the recordings to all parties that would benefit from such access.